question about minutes in a year?

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Beacuse there are actually slightly less than 365.25 days in a year. Every year we only count 365 days and leave off the 0.25 days so we fall behind slighty every year. Every four years we have a leap year where we take the 4 x 0.25 = 1 day and have an extra day in February to catch up....Show more

I don't think a day is EXACTLY 24 hours. That's why we have leap years. Google is probably correct - you're not accounting for that extra 1 day every 4 years.

if you change the formula to

60x24x365.25... you get 525,960....Show more

a day is the length in time that it takes the earth to rotate once.

a year is the length in time that it takes the earth to revolve around the sun once.

when we first started reckoning time, we did not do so down to such minute divisions as minutes and seconds, we did not even have the mathematical ability to do so.

it wasn't until our civilizations were advanced enough to start making detailed astronomical calculations that it became evident that the time it took for the sun to "be in the same place in the sky" (which is what we thought was happening, as it was not widely believed the earth went around the sun until later) was not an exact multiple of the time it took from mid-day to mid-day (realize once again that "days" are of different length, depending on where on earth you are, and what time of year it is).

by the time of the Roman emperor Julius Caesar, it was known that the amount of days between vernal equinoxes was around 365.25 days, and this is the time allotted for a year in the Julian calendar, established in 45 B.C.

however, this is actually around 11 minutes too much, and by 1582 things were so badly out of whack, that Pope Gregory XIII had to chop 10 days off the calendar to keep Easter from moving steadily across the calendar (Easter's celebration date is tied to the vernal equinox).

even the Gergorian calendar is not quite accurate enough, and in around 3,000 years, around another day of error will have accrued.

so: to answer your question.....it depends on what you mean by "year". calendar years are not actual "solar" years, there is a small amount of difference. we rectify most of this difference with "leap years" which is to say, we add a day to our calendar year every 4 years (well, almost every 4 years) to adjust for the extra time actually in a solar year.

what you have to realize, is that the time it takes for the earth to go around the sun, isn't changing (well, it is, but on a very small scale not worth talking about). it's our meausrement system that is flawed, not the universe. our original idea that our lives were cycles inside cycles (like seconds are inside minutes are inside hours, all lining up at the change of the hour), turns out to have been wrong...the cycles don't line up exactly.

so there are 525,600 minutes in a calendar year. but a calendar year is not a "true" year, it's an invention by mankind to approximate solar years, and it's off by (almost) 349 minutes....Show more

1) 60(min)x24(hours)= 1,440
2) 1,440x30(1 month)= 43, 200
3) 43,200x12(1 year)= 518,400 minutes in a year

If this is for a math class or something and you're a kid, i think this is all they're looking for but i'm not sure....Show more